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DOD: Naval Station Mayport
Naval Station (NS) Mayport in Jacksonville, Florida serves as a base for Navy ships, airplanes, and helicopters, as well as a training and repair station for the Atlantic fleet of the U.S. Navy. To maintain operations at NS Mayport, 600,000 cubic yards of sediment must be dredged every 18 months. The existing upland spoil capacity is exhausted and ocean disposal of the dredged material has been temporarily approved under the base's current Army Corps of Engineers (COE) permit. The COE permit requires that chemical, biological, and physical analysis on the dredged material be performed and approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) every three years. The permitting process takes approximately one year to complete.
In 1993, NS Mayport was designated the east coast's Navy Environmental Leadership Program (NELP) site by the Chief of Naval Operations. The NELP is a Navy-wide broad-based program which aims to reduce the environmental footprint and effect of naval facilities. In 1995, EPA and the Department of Defense (DOD) signed a memorandum of agreement for regulatory reinvention pilot projects. This agreement (commonly known as ENVVEST) was established to provide a framework for the development of regulatory reinvention pilot projects at approximately three to five selected DOD facilities. DOD and EPA outlined the ENVVEST agreement to reflect Project XL requirements. NS Mayport was selected for this program because of the environmental leadership and innovation it has demonstrated in the past. One tool NS Mayport can use to investigate potential environmentally-friendly initiatives is the ENVVEST Program.
NS Mayport is proposing to investigate and demonstrate two methods of beneficial reuse of dredged material. The two methods are: 1) producing construction building blocks from dredged material and 2) producing artificial reef material from dredged material. Initially, the dredged material for construction of the building blocks and the artificial reef material will be derived from two existing upland storage cells. In the future, the dredged material would come from the temporary storage at the upland storage cells, thereby eliminating the need for ocean disposal of this material. Additionally, NS Mayport is proposing to utilize excess fly ash produced by the City of Jacksonville's electric authority as a solidification material for the construction blocks. If the fly ash is not suitable for use in the construction blocks, NS Mayport will look for other solidification agents. Potential environmental benefits of this project include:
- decrease and eventually eliminate the need for ocean
disposal of dredged material, which minimizes the potential for impacts
to water quality and benthic communities;
- create new reef habitats or repair existing reefs
by use of solidified dredged material as artificial reef;
- lower the potential impact to the endangered Northern
Right Whale (NRW) by reducing the number of transects across the NRW
migration pathways and calving grounds;
- reduce the waste streams associated with disposal
of fly ash; and
- reduce the need for raw materials (cement, aggregate)
necessary for making concrete (for construction blocks to be used
on land).
NS Mayport is asking EPA under the ENVVEST/XL process to create a partnership with the COE, the State of Florida, the City of Jacksonville, and other interested stakeholders that would facilitate streamlining the permitting process by extending the length of these permits and synchronizing the permitting cycles.